With Regards to Vista

Regarding Vista...

Just as a warning: I wrote this to be my first in-depth review of anything this big. I'm not here to bash the daylights out of Vista, just to point out where it can become annoying. Its not a bad operating system, it could just use some work. Or a nice big update.

I bought my laptop this over 6 months ago
and was rather pleased to say that it had Vista pre-installed (as
opposed to "Vista Ready!" or "Free Upgrade to Vista!"). So, I took it
home, booted it, went back to the store, reminded the geniuses at Best
Buy that computers were typically packaged with power cords, and
returned home.


Upon booting it, everything was like a breath
of fresh air covered in some sort of shiny gloss. Everything looked
great and visually, it impressed me. Then I installed my stuff onto it
(Firefox, Pidgin, and an assortment of games) and THAT is when I
noticed Vista's "advanced security features" which basically boil down
to asking if it can do pretty much everything from running a program to
changing your wallpaper. I finally got mad enough to shut off the
"Advanced Security Features" and continued to install my old programs.
Contrary to popular belief, old programs DO in fact work on Vista:
however, the computer will occasionally block the program from
accessing important files and asks you to "run it as an Administrator."
Then, because you see it on all the Vista adds, I tried the whole
"Aero" thing that lets you do cool stuff like flip through windows in
3D. Its great, but rather useless especially on slow computers that
enjoy taking their time flipping through each and every window.


Another new feature to Vista were its ReadyBoost technology, which
allows you to plug in a flash drive and use it to boost the amount of
system resources your computer has available. This became an immediate
waste of hard drive space as most of the cheap flash drives the average
person buys "don't meet the minimum requirements needed to run it as a
ReadyBoost Drive," namely speed. While I'm ranting, I might as well add
that Vista will try to "scan for errors" whenever you plug in a
portable storage device like an iPod or a flashdrive. Being the naive
idiot that I am, I immediately plugged in my flash drive and had it
"scanned and fixed," at which point I was told that my flash drive had
no problems. And then it told me that it would not work with my
computer and that I had to buy a new one. *sigh*



An annoyance that became increasingly... well,
annoying was the fact that every network you ever connect to is saved
under the "Connect to a network" screen. For instance, say you have a
laptop and walk into a Starbucks. You immediately get an icon on the
taskbar of your computer saying "Networks have been found" and you
click it to select a network. So then, a window pops up showing you a
huge myriad of networks, some which you happened to connect to as you
parked in front of a Barnes and Noble in the middle of nowhere, and
Windows leaves it to you to sort through the networks and pick the one
you want to connect to. This tends to get annoying.


The last feature that was supposed to "enhance my user
experience" was the Bitlocker Drive Encryption, which apparently is
used to encrypt your ENTIRE HARD DRIVE. Everyone was just fine
encrypting important files and letting everything else be, but
Microsoft had to go the extra mile and make a program to encrypt everything.
After encrypting, i noticed a large drop in speed (which really hurts
since Vista is slower than XP in the first place) because everything
had to be decrypted before I could use it. The only reason I can see
someone using this is if they work for a monstrously important business (say, oh... the CIA) or tend to connect to remote networks from their
laptop. However, seeing as laptops are generally slower than PC's,
sacrificing performance for security might not be admirable.

Overall, Vista isn't bad. Not great, but not as terrible as, say,
Hitler. It looks great, organizes your files easily, and includes a DVD
maker (finally) as well as a better Microsoft Paint (that can actually save .jpg pictures) and a screenshot-taking program called the Microsoft Snipping Tool. Though I can't
compliment every aspect of it (as all things are bound to have
problems) I can say that it does its job, and it looks rather pretty.